WADA has admitted that Richard McLaren’s 2016 report on the alleged use of doping by Russian athletes is “not sufficient to bring successful cases,” the International Olympic Committee said.
“At the recent meeting (21 February) held by WADA in Lausanne to ‘provide assistance to IFs [International Federations] regarding how to analyse and interpret the evidence,’ it was admitted by WADA that in many cases the evidence provided may not be sufficient to bring successful cases,” Christophe De Kepper, director-general and member of the executive board of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), said in a letter to IOC, RT reports.
Based on the first part of McLaren’s report published on June 18, 2016, which presented the results of his investigation into alleged doping at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games, WADA recommended that the IOC, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), and all international sporting federations exclude Russia from their competitions. The entire team of Russian Paralympians was consequently banned from the Rio games.
The second part of the report, which came out on December 9, 2016, also claimed that over 1,000 Russian athletes participating in summer, winter, and Paralympic competitions had benefited from an alleged plot to conceal positive doping tests.
“In his first interim report, Professor McLaren describes a ‘state sponsored system,’ whilst in the final full report in December he described an ‘institutional conspiracy,’” De Kepper says in the letter.
The IOC will now have to consider “what this change means and which individuals, organizations or government authorities may have been involved.”
Now, WADA has told the international sports federations “to make direct contact with the IP [McLaren] team to try to obtain further information,” De Kepper’s letter reveals, adding “WADA also explained that the translations used by the IP team were not adequate and was obtaining official translations of some of the texts.”
